Take your left hand and hold the lead rope as if it's the left rein. Pull the halter slowly toward yourself.
"Concentrate. Feel how much pressure it takes to bring that rope toward you. You should feel on your pinky how many ounces it takes. Throw it back out and do it again. This time close your eyes and really concentrate. If you get this lesson, horse training gets a whole lot easier. Really focus on what it feels like. How many ounces is it taking to bring that halter back to you? Think of a specific number. How many pounds? How many ounces? One or two? 5 pounds or 5 ounces?
"How would you like your horse to be that soft? A pound or two doesn't seem so bad, does it? Actually, it's terrible. Having to put a pound or two of pressure on the rein to get it to "come back to you" is just terrible. Take the halter off the lead rope now and throw the rope back out, snap end first.
"Do the same thing, drag the snap back to you. How does that feel? It feels pretty light, right? You feel a big difference. But that's still terrible. Now take the lead rope and throw the opposite end out, the end without the snap. That feels really light. It feels like nothing. It's still terrible.
Finally, start up your truck and slowly drive your horse around. Be careful to make your turns gradual (large, sweeping arcs) and to go easy on the brakes until your horse develops some sense of balance. (Have somebody drive just you, the human, around in the back of the trailer and you'll soon see how difficult it is to keep your balance when you can't see turns and stops coming. It'll give you empathy with your horse, that's for sure.) Give yourself (and your horse) several sessions of "just driving around" to help him adjust to this new situation. If you've got an event coming up, you will be well-served to invest the time it takes to practice in the days (better, weeks) preceding.
When it's time to take your horse back off the trailer, let him sit there a moment. Taking the horse directly out of the trailer will soon teach him that "stop" means "get out." He'll get ansty, perhaps paw, dance about or trumpet. It's best when you are working with a horse that's relatively new to trailering to simply let it cool its heels for a couple of minutes before unloading him. To unload, I simply put light pressure on the lead rope or kiss. If you've practiced unloading as previously described, your horse will have already been off the trailer hundreds of times, so unloading after his first big ride should be no big deal.
Tomorrow we'll cover additional "pre-trailering" exercises that you may want to employ, should you have a truly difficult horse or simply want to improve your leading.
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Your horse is like a garden hose. Pressure, or energy, flows through your horse from one end to the other like water through a hose. To stop the water you wouldn't simply crimp the hose in half – and to stop your horse you wouldn't simply pull back on both reins. You won't stop the water and you won't stop the horse. You'll get leaks.
Until you teach your horse to deal with the pressure.
Crimp the hose and you get leaks, pull back on both reins and your horse "gets leaks." He'll leak that energy. Body parts will shoot out to the left, to the right, up or down. He'll jig to the right or left, bolt, shoot backward, buck or rear.
Controlling Your Horse's Speed
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The solution is this: Use training exercises to let a little pressure leak here and there, redirecting that energy to your advantage. For example, in our Hip-Shoulder-Shoulder exercise we begin by walking forward, then pick up a and ask one shoulder to stop while the rear end keeps moving. We cause one shoulder to stop, so we make a connection between the rein and stopping the shoulder – but we allow the energy to continue flowing by allowing (or causing) the hips to keep moving. By not bottling the horse up, we've helped keep him calm, yet achieved a training objective. We've shown him how to channel that energy into a turn, a stop or whatever. And for the horse that wasn't stopping, it's become a simple thing to "turn the water off."
For instance: Is your horse getting jiggy with ya? Does he just kind of dance around, looking for trouble? Look for ways to redirect this energy in your every day riding to calm him down. Want to teach a particular movement? Begin thinking of "re-channeling" the movement of your horse through a combination of body parts. Allowing pressure to escape "out your horse's shoulder" back and to the left creates a spin to the left. Allowing half his energy to go out his shoulder to the left and the other half out his hindquarters to the left creates a sidepass. It's easy when you break it down and stick with it.
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There are certain products that every long-time Lyons fan carries in his equine tool kit. They're the "gotta haves." Here are a few essentials - as recommended by this John Lyons Certified Trainer, Keith Hosman.
